Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author Stacy Schiff on Writing The Witches

“Why do women’s voices so disturb?” asks Stacy Schiff over lunch at the Taj hotel in Boston, a half-hour’s drive and three centuries removed from one of American history’s darker chapters. The question is at the heart of Schiff’s expansive latest, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (Little, Brown), the closest any author has come to a complete portrait of an episode that continues to compel and confound. How, in the space of a year, did a community turn on itself, resulting in the murder of 20 people—and imprisonment of more than a hundred others—for witchcraft?

Schiff, who won a Pulitzer for her biography of Véra Nabokov, has a talent for separating historical figures from their own mythologies—most recently, in her best-selling book on Cleopatra. Salem, a subject that has endured in highly distorted form largely thanks to tourist kitsch and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, arrives with as much speculative baggage as the ancient Egyptian queen. Official trial records are largely missing; even the most meticulous diarists are silent on 1692, pages ripped out. Misconceptions—that the accused were midwives or social outliers—abound. In fact, no one was immune: Those shackled in unheated prisons included church leaders and Boston elite, men and women. They included a 4-year-old girl.

Drawn to a rare moment in American history (suffrage is another) in which attention to women’s voices drives the narrative, Schiff waded in without a thesis, in contrast to previous scholarly approaches. The result is a sprawling cast of characters and agendas, from the ambiguous Cotton Mather, who found an upside to the hysteria in freshly crowded pews, to those touchingly overlooked by history, like the young girl who, upon seeing officials arrive at her home to arrest her, fled through the back door. “The amount of pressure on these women was extraordinary,” reflects the author, pointing to the case of another young girl who rode to jail, minister on one side, brother on the other, both insisting that she was a witch. “Anyone who really stands up to the authorities isn’t going to make it. Defiance comes at a price.” (The story of one defiant woman of Salem who managed to escape can be found here.)

But Puritans aren’t, generally speaking, so easy to humanize, and the clink of the shackles and spectacle of shrieking girls could carry the story only so far, as Schiff understood. “I realized the only way to do justice to it, to make it seem real, was to begin by buying into the idea of witchcraft,” she says. “Because if you just think of this as a weird, superstitious belief, which it wasn’t, then the whole thing doesn’t make sense.” For most Puritans, witches and demons were simply part of life. “It’s particularly frightening, because these are the most educated men of the day living in a particularly enlightened society, doing this in the name of God.”

the witches

Photo: Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company

What does survive of trial accounts reads like a psychic blueprint of the community, with testimony suggesting long-simmering grudges and resentments, domestic abuse, even sexual fantasies. “Who doesn’t have a bone to pick with a neighbor?” Schiff writes. “There were as many reasons to accuse someone of witchcraft in 1692 as there were to denounce him under the Nazi occupation of France: envy, insecurity, political enmity, unrequited love, love that had run its course.” Deft as always at psychological context, Schiff grounds the crisis in a time of political and religious instability: the 1689 Andros revolt, a well-publicized witchcraft outbreak in Sweden, and a series of Native American incursions. “Everyone knew a story about a dismembering or an abduction. That was especially true of the convulsing Salem girls, of whom at least half were refugees from or had been orphaned by attacks in ‘the last Indian war.’ ”

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Schiff’s account appropriately puts the accusing girls front and center, but the extent to which they were coached into performing or naming names by adults—the Reverend Parris and the aggrieved Putnam family are likely candidates—remains opaque. And for those of us who bristle at the idea of adolescent female hysteria, Schiff’s take—that the girls’ symptoms were genuine, contagious, and consistent with what we now call conversion disorder—isn’t easy to accept. “Because you’re a rational person, obviously. You didn’t have a hysterical phase,” Schiff smiles. Perhaps the biggest obstacle for anyone who writes about Salem is how little we have of their unfiltered perspective. “Could one of these girls just have left a diary!” she says. “To do this without them speaking for themselves just seems like writing a book with your hands tied behind your back.” (While Puritan women were taught to read the Bible, few could write.)

Any history book is also about the time in which it is written, and Schiff doesn’t let us off the hook, arguing that we see Salem as a cautionary tale against overreacting in the name of national security concerns. Fear takes many forms in our culture, from police brutality to Guantanamo Bay. We’re no less adept at over-prosecuting or scapegoating than the Puritans (and, in the age of Twitter, just as skilled at public shaming, as the author points out). But for Schiff, the last word on the lessons of Salem belongs to her 15-year-old daughter: “Mama, a teenage girl’s mind is a mystery even to her.”